Friday form guide: far closer than it looks

Red Bull set the headline pace on Friday at Spa, but Lotus looked a match on long runs and Mercedes' appeared to be in conservative mode. Tyres, as Mark Hughes outlines, were also back in the news

Tyres were back in the news for the wrong reasons after second practice at Spa, with sudden deflations of the right-rears on the cars of Sebastian Vettel and Fernando Alonso.

In both cases by the time the tyre punctured they were at Stavelot, where that tyre would be the unloaded one - the assumption being that if the puncture was induced by a structural failure in the tyre, the damage would have been done in the preceding fast left-hander of Pouhon.